Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Feb 18, 2019

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1) Marc Champion, Who's Going to the Soviet Reunion?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/a ... s-empire-strike-out

Quote: "Russia has tried enticing or coercing its neighbors [all former Soviet republics; Soviet Union had 15, including Russia] in many ways: offering subsidized gas, buying strategic infrastructure, imposing trade and energy embargoes, meddling in elections, and using military force. The results are mixed at best. Russia and four ex-republics have joined an EU look-alike, the EEU, or Eurasian Economic Union. But the three Baltic states, always special cases, joined NATO and the EU long ago. Of the remaining seven, some look beyond reach. Putin won Crimea for Russia, and Russian troops occupy the breakaway regions of Transnistria in Moldova and Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia—but he arguably lost the chance for strategic integration with at least two of those countries [the other five are Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Turkmenia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan] as a result.

Note:
(a)
(i) summary underneath the title in print: With its efforts to rebuild a sphere of influence in trouble, Russia for now will be happy if ex-republics are too corrupt to join the West
(ii) Print and the online version are the same.
(b)
(i) Read only the paragraph 1 and view the only (in print, but not online) graphic in addition. Otherwise there is no need to read the rest of text.
(ii) The graphic is summarized here:

"Richer Than Russia[:]
EU  $17.3t GDP
China  $12.2t
Russia  $1.6t
Other EEU [other than Russia]: $235b
Other ex-Soviet: $221b"

Online but not in print (beneath the graphic):  "Data: World Bank"
(c) Eurasian Economic Union (2015- ; member: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia; table: Type  both political and economic union [this is why BusinessWeek calls EEU "EU look-alike"])  Wikipedia.

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(3) Jeremy Kahn, Selina Wang and Natalia Drozdiak, Europe's Quiet Tech Success.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/a ... ompanies-keep-it-up

Quote:

"Pieter van der Does [Adyen CEO; company based in Amsterdam] doesn't resemble the stereotype of a Silicon Valley executive who favors massive parties and private jets. He spent decades cycling around Amsterdam on the bike he got in high school. R&R generally means hiking with his family, not jetting off to St. Tropez or Ibiza.

"Quiet, frugal, steady—this is the image Adyen brought to investors, one that's helped almost double the obscure Dutch company’s market value, to $21.8 billion, since its June IPO, suddenly ranking it among Europe’s hottest digital companies. If you’ve ridden in an Uber, subscribed to Netflix, or paid for Spotify Premium, there’s a good chance Adyen ran your card. The one past indulgence the CEO cops to is mountain climbing

"What separates the company from the likes of PayPal, Stripe, and Alipay in the $2 trillion digital payments business is that it’s a one-stop shop. While other companies handle just a link or two in the convoluted chain moving money from customers to merchants, Adyen handles the entire process, from checkout to fraud detection to dealing with Visa and Bank of America to making sure sellers get paid.

"While the company's first-half profits rose 75 percent last year, to €48.2 million (about $54 million), 'sustainability of the growth is my biggest question,' says Christopher Brendler, an analyst at Buckingham Research Group. * * * Translation: When you're trading at 140 times forecast earnings [price/earning ration or P/E ratio], there's nowhere to go but down.

"At its founding in 2006, Adyen saw the mobile web coming. A decade earlier, Van der Does * * * joined BiBit, an early web payments company, as chief commercial officer. BiBit was sold to Royal Bank of Scotland for an undisclosed sum in 2004. * * * Van der Does and BiBit co-founder Arnout Schuijff came up with the idea for a mobile BiBit [ie, payment with a cellphone]

"While rivals competed mostly on price, Schuijff and Van der Does bet that merchants would pay for faster, more reliable transactions.

"In 2012, the year Van der Does first signed Uber, Adyen processed a grand total of $10 billion in payments; five years later, the number was $122 billion.

Note:
(a)
(i) summary underneath the title in print: The safe-looking fintech company has drawn waves of investors since its IPO
(ii) Print and the online version are the same.
(b) There is no need to read the rest.
(c) In print but not online, the background of the title is

"Market cap[italization:]
Adyen $21.8b

Lufthansa $11.9b
Michelin $20.9b
Renault $18.9b
Ryanair $15.1b
SAP $129.3b
Spotify $25.7b
Swatch $15.7b"
(d) Our Story. Adyen, undated
https://www.adyen.com/about
("Adyen's founding team called the business Adyen – Surinamese for 'Start over again' – and focused on building a modern infrastructure directly connected to card networks and local payment methods across the world")
(e) Ibiza
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibiza

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(2) Elisabeth Behrmann and Niclas Rolander with Blake Schmidt, From Sweden with Torque.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/a ... -ferrari-at-249-mph
("Since 2002 his [Christian von Koenigsegg's] company, Koenigsegg Automotive AB, has sold about a dozen hand-built cars annually for roughly $2 million apiece. * * * Koenigsegg in January signed a $320 million deal with National Electric Vehicle Sweden AB, or NEVS, a Chinese-controlled company that bought the assets of Saab out of bankruptcy in 2012. * * * With a $930 million investment from Chinese tycoon Hui Ka Yan in January, NEVS will make battery-powered sedans based on the old Saab 9-3 underpinnings, as well as the new Koenigsegg")

Note:
(a)
(i) summary underneath the title in print: An artisan upstart with Chinese backing moves in on Ferrari's territory
(ii) Print and the online version are the same.
(b) There is no need to read the rest. The quotation is the only connections to Chinese.
(c)
(i) HUI Ka Yan is Cantonese spelling for (pinyin) XU Jiayin 许家印 (born in 1958 in 河南省 ; founder of Shenzhen-based real-estate Evergrande Group 恒大集团)  en.wikipedia.org for Xu Jiayin.
(ii) NEVS "is a Swedish holding company that has acquired the assets of Saab from a bankruptcy estate in 2012. The company focuses on the development of electric vehicles. * * * On 21 June 2016, NEVS announced they will no longer use the Saab trademark. * * * New owners, January 2019."  en.wikipedia.org for "National Electric Vehicle Sweden."

The last clause in the quotation has a reference: Evergrande Group New Main Owner in NEVS AB. NEVS, Jan 15, 2019
https://www.nevs.com/en/media/pr ... n-owner-in-nevs-ab/
("Evergrande Group in China has acquired 51% of the shares in NEVS AB in Sweden. * * * NEVS AB was founded in 2012 by Kai Johan Jiang when he bought the bankruptcy estate after Saab Automobile. Since then he has been major owner of the company.  During the six years, NEVS has built a new car manufacturing plant in Tianjin, China, and now has started to build another one, in Shanghai, China, in addition to the one the company has in Trollhättan, Sweden.   To do this and to develop new electric vehicles and transport solutions for the future requires a lot of money")
(iii) Kai Johan Jiang (1965- ; a Swedish-Chinese; "In 2004, Jiang founded State Power (Dragon Power Company), a Chinese energy company active in the sustainable energy sources, mainly biomass. He is the CEO of State Power Group")  en.wikipedia.org for Kai Johan Jiang.
(iv) from the Web:
蒋大龙 (出生在山东沂蒙地区的农村)
NEVS  国能电动汽车瑞典有限公司
State Power Group Co, Ltd - DragonPower  国能集团有限公司 (2004- ; based in 北京市平谷区)